Student Portfolios

Once again, I'm going to do a brain dump to see if I can flesh out my thoughts, this time on student portfolios.

I want to create e-portfolios for my students next year. I teach 6th, 7th and 8th graders, so I would also like for the portfolios to follow the student from year to year. I would ideally like for the students and the whole middle school team to be able to acces them and add to them. I've thought about Evernote, but I don't know how to do that without having pro accounts for everyone. I'm really looking for a free alternative.

I could set up a free Evernote account to share with the rest of the team with notebooks for each student, but I don't know how we would avoid going over limit each month. With 4 or more teachers adding content to 60 student accounts, we would likely go over limit fairly quickly. I suppose I could allow students to upload without giving them access (read: password and therefore access to everyone's student files) by having them email straight to the Evernote account, but I'm not really sure how that feature works. Would it work well. Would the notes added this way wind up in the correct notebooks or would I be creating a ton of work for myself. If it would be cumbersome, it might be easier to have students email content to me directly and I could put the information into their notebooks for them.

Then there is the issue of what to do with the portfolios once the students leave our school. Ideally, I'd like to be able to give them their notebooks when they leave, but you cannot transfer ownership of an Evernote notebook.

Most of my thinking on this has centered around Evernote, mainly because I use it and love it, although I'm sure there are other options out there. I need to put this out to my Twitter people, as they are a knowledgeable and resourceful group.

That's all for now.